Chief Digital Product Officer of Les Mills - Amber Taylor

Amber, it's great to see you. Great to have this discussion. I wanted to ask you, before we get into the details about Les Mills and your career in the past, how did you get into running?

Gosh. Well, first off, thank you so much for having me here. It's great to chat again and to be on the podcast. So how did I get into running? I have been running since I was a little kid. I'm actually doing this recording from my dad's dining room table right now in San Anselmo in California. It's interesting because I just went for a run now and I crested the top of a hill behind his house and looked down and there was my high school track.

But I started running in elementary school and then middle school mainly because I can't catch a ball or kick a ball. I'm terrible at ball sports, but I'm really fast. So I could always run away from the ball. And I decided to take that and to apply it more to track and cross country. And then all throughout school, I did track and cross country. Took a break in college because I joined a sorority and decided to do other things than run competitively. And then after college, got into marathons and haven't stopped since.

Wow. And Melanie last time mentioned when I was speaking with her Nike experience in the interviews that they had here running for the interview process. Did you have something similar? 

I did not have running for the interview process. The process was pretty robust. Yeah, well, the reality is I actually applied to Nike eight times before I got the role. And then ironically, none of those applications got me in or a headhunter brought me in. The job was a dream job and it was a perfect fit at Nike. So I got in more by a fluke, by having the right experience and then by being discovered by a recruiter online.

I had a couple of phone screens and at the time I was living in Seattle, so took the train up and had about eight interviews. No running, it was a full panel of interviews. That's pretty neat though. I wanna use that trick with other people. I did get taken on a run for my Les Mills interview. I think that was a test in flexibility and brain and partnership, but no running for Nike.

And then what your role at Nike was what?

So I started there as a director of product. My role was in the central product management organization. And when I very first started, my role was to go in and teach other people how to do product. So I would embed with teams and teach people how to do expected outcomes or working backwards documents and plans or, sequencing in a roadmap. But then after about two or three months, I was embedded into the Nike training club team to work with them to build up and launch Nike Training Club premium, a paid premium subscription tier of NTC, which we did really rapidly.

We did it in under a year and it was a great experience. We wound up canceling it during COVID because we wanted everyone to have access to sports, especially during COVID at no cost. And from Nike, it was a way to drive engagement. And then very rapidly through my career there took over something called a transformational initiative. It was the editorial transformational initiative to work across digital and across marketing to help speed up our time to plan, produce and publish content and really make sure that we could have always on storytelling for athletes.

Nike says “if you have a body, you're an athlete”. So it was really “how do we increase the velocity of content for athletes?” Right content, right touch points, right time. And got to work on that for a bit. And then pulling it forward, another year later, I became VP of MarTech and personalization. So I oversaw more of the backend tools and systems for how we supported marketing MarTech, and then the homepage and website for personalization.

Amber, there is this saying from many entrepreneurs that when you bring in a position of leadership someone outside of the company, it's more difficult culturally. How would you suggest someone navigate this situation?

I tend to agree with that. I think every company has a different culture and a different way of working. And this is why I think going in and really being a sponge and learning and curious in the beginning is super important to understand the way of working in the culture first before trying to change anything. I think having worked at Amazon and at Nike, those two company cultures and ways of working are night and day, totally different.

Both of them obsess the customer first, but then the way you get work done is completely different. Amazon does working backwards and documents large data. You go into a meeting and read first, and then you talk. Nike really obsesses how you make people feel and what you can do. Lots of PowerPoints, no word documents, and a different type of use of data and storytelling. And so having the experience at those two companies helped me come into Les Mills to understand the need to listen first before putting what I think might drive change or progress.

And to be candid, I have changed many things, like the way that we work in product and the way that we work in engineering and moving more to a product model instead of an outsource or waterfall model. But I never would have been able to make those changes without understanding why the company operated the way it operated first. If I had come in and proposed changes in the first month, I probably would have gotten some of those proposals wrong.

At Nike, we used to have a phrase that “the body might reject the organ”. And it was for when people came in from outside companies and immediately tried to impose what they did in the past on Nike. The same thing is true at Les Mills or at any company. If somebody comes in and doesn't understand the ‘why’ or the ways of working and immediately wants to change things–even if they're good changes–it's met with a little bit of a “hold on, you need to understand the 55 year culture and history first”. So I really practice that coming in at Les Mills.

Our leadership team, I genuinely like them. There's a couple that I hang out with outside of work, but really respect them. And we all have very different superpowers. We all come from different companies and we all come from different ways of doing things in the past. I think taking the time to understand the people in the way of working and then have the conversations to propose some changes was critically important, especially at senior levels because you need the partnership and you need to take teams on the journey with you.

If you would advise an early-stage company right now in terms of content, how do they create great content and how do they distribute that content? How would you do that?

I wish we could clone Jackie a thousand times. Jackie Mills is the leader of group training and Diana Archer Mills also is a key leader in group training. They really obsess what are trends, what do people want, and then they build for what works. And there's a lot of thinking and testing that goes into that.

I think the first most important thing with content is make sure that it's effective and make sure that it's safe. What I'm seeing a lot on YouTube and TikTok and in other platforms is a huge breadth and quantity of content because a lot of companies are starting to produce it really rapidly and a lot of user generated content, but it's not all safe. And that really scares me because in a time where we need more people.

The world needs fitness more than it ever has before. don't know if you've read any of the latest WHO studies or papers, but obesity continues to rise, fitness continues to go down. We need more good content. So for companies who are getting started, they'll make sure that the content's safe and make sure that it's what people want. So what I would really advise is looking at what are the psychographics of what people want to engage with, where they want to engage with them, the types of content, getting precise on that, and then being excellent in making sure that it's safe and tested before you publish anything.

Because as soon as companies start publishing things that are not safe, they will lose people. But then the industry loses people too, so it's bad for all of us.

Yeah, I also wanted to ask you about VR. How do you see the world in VR? I know that you're doing very well there. Can you give us some insights in terms of VR and how do you see the future of this? Is this going to be us wearing a device and then doing all our training there? Is this going to be some sort of hybrid? What do you think?

Yeah, well, I'll tell you how we got into it and then some hypotheses, because I think the world of VR is continuing to evolve. And now we're looking more at XR–extended reality. We got into VR about two years ago, working with Meta and Pico. And we've got a really great partner called Otters, who are based out of Spain. And they built our VR games and experiences. And we got in as early tests with Meta and Pico and we were really lucky that we did.

We started doing it with Body Combat and then we have another title called Dance, which just came out this year, which is exciting. The reason we got into them is we wanted to test the grounds.

We saw that the technology of VR was starting to pick up. The market segment size of VR and XR is growing quite a bit year over year. We worked really closely with Meta Otters and ourselves to produce games. And then we had Body Combat on Pico as well. Pico's a big company out of China. And the first one was a test and learn “could we build the games?” And what we found is they were hugely popular on the Meta or in Quest, drove super high retention, super high awareness, and growth, and they continue to do that.

Last year at their conference, Mark Zuckerberg, I think referenced our company more than any other one. We were the number one in fitness, which was quite exciting.

We do believe there's a future in XR. I think what's currently VR is going to continue to change. We're already seeing more companies building headsets and we're seeing headsets evolve and get smaller and more discreet. And then we're also starting to see new kinds of XR wearables, like the Meta Ray-Ban collaboration was fascinating. Cameras are getting smaller and smaller. We've also seen that VR and XR is getting some people who were not active in fitness before to become active in fitness.

So we want to keep leaning into that and learning into that. As an example, last year we had a woman tell us that her father wouldn't leave the house because he was too embarrassed and he wouldn't work out. And she bought him a Quest headset for Christmas because he liked gaming. And he started doing our body combat workouts because it felt like a game, not like a workout. And he got super into it and then started on a fitness journey.

We love that, that a new form factor can actually get somebody to start building healthy habits and start something new. We love stories like that. I think for what's the future of VR and XR, I don't see it going away. More and more companies are getting into the space, but I do believe that it's gonna keep evolving and changing rapidly. Again, we don't wanna just build for the solution. However, with new technologies like XR, human behavior starts to change because it's a new way of engaging in the world around you.

And so we want to start learning how can we take that new technology and that new capability and help people start building habits with fitness and stick with their habits with fitness. We hypothesize that that's going to span in real-life settings as well as at-home settings. So we're exploring what that might mean. But I think that we're all inventing the future of that together right now, which is quite exciting.

Les Mills' Roadmap: Prioritizing Club Excellence, Innovative Content, and Global Fitness Engagement

What does the roadmap look like for Les Mills?

Right now, we're really obsessing how can we help clubs be excellent. We've been growing our club base year over year, and that's really exciting around the world. I believe we're still coming back from COVID and everybody's coming back to life. Last year was much more of a re-entry into that. But clubs have all kinds of new challenges than what they had four years ago. And we want to make sure that we can help them grow and retain their members.

So we're really obsessing that with new content, new programs, bringing them the best instructors who can teach in the club. And that's the number one thing we're focused on.

We have a couple new innovations with our content that we're doing. And so on the digital side, we prioritize how do we support and serve that making it dead simple for clubs to find and manage instructors to get access to their programs, which include live and virtual. And then we're also spending a lot of time on what happens out of club, but that drives this flywheel of fitness. and that includes continuing to innovate in our D to C experiences, Les Mills Plus and Les Mills.

Les Mills content is a logged-out experience where people can discover and engage with content. Typically we use that to support engagement with clubs. And so we have some innovation there. And then we're spending a lot of time on privacy, security, and what I call the beautiful basics of platform hygiene because that will drive productivity, cost savings, and scalability for the company, really tactically our roadmaps clustered by customer.

We obsess all of the work against our movers, clubs, and instructors. And then we have shared work across those beautiful basics that I mentioned. And if you were to look at the roadmap, you'd quickly see that a lot of it airs to ‘how can we obsess making clubs excellent and making things dead simple for them?’ Everything on the roadmap has an expected outcome, what we expect to do, and some of the trade-offs.

But it's not all value drops. We have problem statements that we're solving for because we will be agile based on the needs of the customers and change things throughout the quarter and throughout the year. So the roadmap that you see today might be slightly different in two months.

I ask all the guests, if we're 100 years in the future and we look backwards, what would you say are the things that we'd be witnessing and we're saying that we're doing them today in training and fitness that’s wrong?

I love that there are influencers and people who want to help in the world of fitness, but rapidly creating content that's not safe can actually really hurt people. So I think if we look back and see that, that's the one risk. I want to make sure that people are creating things that truly help people. 

Les Mills is leaning in a lot to something that we call “Born to Move”, which is getting kids to move. I think more people need to lean into that. Kids, and this is in that WHO article too, child and adolescent obesity is going up and mental health is going down. I think we're missing the mark on helping that entire population. And we need to, not just for the future of fitness and the fitness industry, it's because it's the right thing to do for human beings.

We know that healthier people are happier people. And frankly, I don't think we're doing enough to help in that space. And so I think from a health and fitness, it's how do we really bring access to everybody and make sure that they have access to get inspired and move in safe and fun and delightful ways.

And then how do we double down on that access and make sure that we can build healthy habits. I love to run and I feel a little bit crazy if I don't run on a certain day, but that's weird. Most people don't love that or want that every day. So how do we as an industry make things that are lovable so that we can help take people on the journey because it's good for them.